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| Edited By: DNA |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 19, 2018, 07:05 AM IST
The death of eight people, including a six-month-old girl, in a fire that had wreaked havoc at Mumbai’s ESIC Kamgar hospital on Monday brings back painful memories of another devastating blaze in the same city in 2017.
On December 29 last year the Kamala Mills fire that had claimed 14 lives had sparked widespread outrage, prompting both the state government and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to take some drastic action.
One of the steps taken entailed doing fire safety audits of residential and commercial structures. Once the public outcry petered out, things lapsed into a state of apathy and neglect. As a result, a government hospital could operate with just a provisional fire licence for decades, thus putting several lives at risk. And, why not?
It has been nine years since the Maharashtra government proposed several fire safety rules for buildings but the law, yet to be enacted, had gone into cold storage. Human lives in India are notoriously cheap. It is expected that people will die of man-made disasters because like apathy, negligence, too, is a part and parcel of our everyday life.
Recall that the Bombay High Court had said in March this year that the fire safety audits of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai were not much effective. Mumbai highrises are tinderbox; many of them do not have the requisite equipment or the infrastructure to tackle fires.
Till now, there have been about 14 major fire incidents in the city where sprawling slums are as vulnerable as skyscrapers. Like the Kamala Mills fire, the state government will order an inquiry to bide time. For the city bursting at the seams, the wait will last till the next disaster strikes and some more lives perish.
